AI SEO: how to get found in ChatGPT and AI Overviews

Something fundamental has changed in how people search. In Google you type three or four words. In ChatGPT you ask a whole question, with context added. Research shows prompts averaging twenty to sixty words, and conversations with follow-up questions instead of a single search. If you write content for the three-word searcher, you are invisible to the person asking questions. This article is about what you can do about that.

How people really query AI (and why it affects your content)

The figures from recent studies are strikingly consistent. AI searches are on average three times as long as classic Google queries; on ChatGPT, prompts run to dozens of words. People add context ("I run an online shop selling garden furniture and want…"), ask follow-up questions and refine within a conversation instead of typing a new search. Roughly a quarter of all ChatGPT interactions are pure information seeking.

For your content, that means three things. One: the question someone asks an AI is probably never literally in your keyword list, but your page still has to answer it. Two: AI assistants look for the best answer, not the best page; a wall of text with the answer hidden somewhere in it loses to a page that opens with the answer. Three: follow-up questions mean that one page covering the whole topic (question, nuance, exceptions, costs) is worth more than five thin pages.

Writing for the question: the answer-first format

The most important thing you can change today requires no technical work: turn your articles around. Start with the question as a heading, give the answer in two to four sentences directly below it, and only then go into detail. That block at the top is exactly what an AI assistant looks for when it selects sources, and your human readers like it better too.

Make your claims verifiable: "delivery in 1-2 working days" gets cited more readily than "fast delivery", and "measured in August 2026" more readily than "recent research". Cover the whole topic on one page instead of splitting it across five thin articles: you want the follow-up questions people ask AI to be answered on the same page already. An FAQ block at the bottom with the real follow-up questions (with FAQ structured data) is the simplest way to do that.

The technical side: make your site readable for AI

AI crawlers are lazy readers. Many don't render JavaScript, so content that only appears client-side doesn't exist for them. Server-side rendered HTML is the safe foundation. Structured data (FAQ, Product, Organization) hands them the facts ready-made. And an llms.txt in the root of your site gives language models a summary of who you are and which pages matter, all in one file.

Do distinguish between Google and the rest. In its guide to generative AI features (May 2026), Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode run on the same ranking and quality systems as the regular search results. An llms.txt, separate Markdown versions, special AI schema or chopping your content into chunks are not needed there. For Google, plain good SEO is what counts. The llms.txt is there for ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.

Don't block AI bots without thinking. Keeping GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot out via robots.txt feels principled, but it also means being impossible to find in the place where your customers ask their questions. At Neuramerce this is built into the platform: next to its SEO score, every page gets an AI findability score, and llms.txt and the product feed for AI bots are maintained automatically.

Where to start tomorrow

Pick your five most important pages and, for each one, ask yourself the question a customer would ask ChatGPT. Does the page answer that question in the first two paragraphs? If not, rebuild it answer-first. Add an FAQ with the real follow-up questions, check whether your content is readable without JavaScript, and set up an llms.txt for the assistants outside Google.

And measure it. Start by getting the basics right with the free site scan, then track whether AI assistants start mentioning you. That is the new rank check. Not sure whether your current SEO tool measures this? In our comparison of ten SEO tools you can see exactly which ones do and don't take AI findability into account.